


The Whispers Your Love Left on My Skin

by paintpuddles



Series: Harry Potter and the Flurry of Ficlets [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soul Marks, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Canonical Child Abuse, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Gen, Harry Potter Needs a Hug, Harry Potter is brave and deserves a cookie, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Love, Minor Character Death, Power of Words, Soul Magic, Souls, soul marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:01:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23668804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paintpuddles/pseuds/paintpuddles
Summary: Words leave Marks.Harry doesn't remember getting his first Words; he remembers the event that caused them, but the aftermath is blurry and disjointed - everything snaps and goes black and then there's nothing until the motorbike and the feeling of flying.The entire world knows that Harry's first Words are Avada Kedavra, and they blossom into being around his throat like a noose.
Relationships: Hermione Granger & Harry Potter & Ron Weasley
Series: Harry Potter and the Flurry of Ficlets [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1522328
Comments: 30
Kudos: 221





	The Whispers Your Love Left on My Skin

**Author's Note:**

> Me: *names the series Harry Potter and the **flurry** of ficlets*  
> Also me: *only posts one fic for months*  
> Me: seems legit
> 
> The love I got on my other HP fic was genuinely ridiculous and so heartwarming... so thank you for that! <3 those lovely, encouraging comments are the reason this got written.

Harry doesn't remember getting his first Words; he remembers the event that caused them, but the aftermath is blurry and disjointed - everything snaps and goes black and then there's nothing until the motorbike and the feeling of flying.

It's funny - in a twisted way - that a memory of such joy and freedom should be wedged next to a memory of such unending horror.

The entire world knows that Harry's first Words are _Avada Kedavra_ , and they blossom into being around his throat like the noose that they are - that they were always intended to be - after they have failed to kill him. They disrupt the path of Fate he walks upon and change his life forever, and so an echo of the phrase that caused this momentous shift is written smoothly into his skin, just as quickly and silently as it is written into his past and present and future; into his nightmares and his memories; into who he _is_.

The Words change everything, and they touch his very _soul_ \- and so they become a part of him.

Harry's next Words are borne from a similar sort of cruelty. It is a different kind of hurt and abuse, certainly, but it is terrible and evil all the same, and it scars him just as easily and irreparably.

**FREAK** is etched into the dip of his lower back where the end of his spine curls, the letters nothing like the smooth, elegant script of the Killing Curse clamped round his throat. No, this insult - this name, label, _identity_ \- is jagged and rough, ugly and repulsive as it clings to his back and refuses to leave it. It looks horribly like the Word was carved into him with a knife, and years later when he is older and the wounds have finally healed, Harry will think that it is a sick sort of appropriate, because that Word made him _bleed_ in a way he could never really stop.

Blood runs thicker and he bleeds worse when Uncle Vernon Marks him again a few years later; he's just shy of nine and it's not the first time the words have been yelled or shrieked at him, but it's the first time he's old enough to truly comprehend what is happening to him and how utterly unfair and _wrong_ it is.

_Get in your cupboard!_ Uncle Vernon spits and snarls from tiny black letters wrapped around Harry's bicep where the older man had grabbed him. Harry sees the spiteful Words once the bruises have faded, and for the first time unbridled hatred licks at his heart.

_(The bruises don't last forever, but the hatred does.)_

_(Words leave marks, after all.)_

His next Words are the first to bring him happiness: _Yer a wizard, Harry._

They are quickly overshadowed and ruined by the story of his parents' deaths - the _real_ story this time - and the entire thing gets transcribed over his right shoulder blade, rocking his tiny little eleven-year-old world to its core as he realises that actually, his parents really did love him _(no, they weren't awful alcoholics who died in a car crash)_ and that they were stolen from him by a man - a _monster_ \- so terrible even his name is corrupted by fear.

Harry gains new Words and a new enemy, and a fierce determination to bring about swift and bloody revenge.

Harry's on a scarlet train and still all scrambled up inside by his last two sets of Words when he gets his next inscription rather by accident.

The ginger boy smiles at him, and even before he fully opens his mouth and speaks Harry can already feel that familiar itching that means he's being Marked. This is the first time his Words give him a fizzing sort of thrill, and it zips down his spine and bursts in his fingertips like the white powder in those flying saucer sweets he'd stolen from Dudley once. They'd danced on his tongue, and this does too, this perfect, magnificent moment Harry can barely believe.

_Hi! My name's Ron, Ron Weasley_ gets scrawled across the palm of Harry's right hand as he returns Ron's enthusiastic handshake, and Harry's dancing on the inside like that fizzy powder had on his tongue because something precious and impossible has happened: the nasty, twisted little freak has made a friend.

It's the best feeling in the world, and it dances inside him like a beautiful fire.

That fire grows in the freezing cold of December when Harry stutters, bewildered and delighted, "I've got presents?"

"Of course you do!" Ron Weasley replies immediately, like it's _obvious_ , and his statement of such a thing like a fact, like a clear truth, has such a profound effect on Harry that the Words scribble themselves across his right knee, which seems to have gone weak from his excitement, as has his left.

It's not just a small pile of Christmas presents to Harry; deep down in his most hidden and secret parts of himself, he realises with incredulity and awe that this is a declaration of his self-worth, his personhood, his value, his _humanity._ He is not a freak. He is not a mistake. He is not _Boy_ , he is _a_ boy, and that means that he deserves this.

He deserves to be loved.

The realisation shakes his world, and transforms it once again - this time into something much kinder and less painful than before.

Every time he doubts such a radical thought, questioning whether he can really be worth all that much, or whether he really matters at all, he rubs his right hand over his right knee, wearing those two Marks that Ronald Weasley gifted him, and whispers to himself _of course you do_.

Their friendship fills Harry with a warmth so strong it reaches to the tip of his nose and ears and toes, and he sometimes daydreams that Ron has scooped up a flame from the Common Room fireplace and planted it in Harry's belly. He imagines the fire is brilliant red and gold, just like the House that has become his home.

Other people get Words as well, of course, but Harry learns that they're rare and most people only get a handful in their lifetime. After all, Words have to have a massive impact on one's life to appear on skin and soul; not just _anything_ can be a Word. They have to be momentous, deeply changing a person or their future - for better or for worse - and the person that leaves them with you, that Marks your soul so irreversibly, is one that will stay in your memory forever. How could they not, when they have quite literally changed both your self and your life?

Harry doesn't know it, when he's eleven and tiny, and the world is just one giant puzzle, but he Marks people. He'd Marked his parents, before they died, with the first words he'd ever spoken _(Ma! Da!)_ , and he Marks Hermione Granger by being her first true friend _(Leave her alone!)_

He doesn't ever know it, but he Marks Draco Malfoy by refusing to be his friend. _I think I can tell the right sort for myself, thanks_ is written around the crease of Draco's right elbow, above the hand he held out but was never shaken, and below the blank space where Harry will one day Mark him again by giving testimony in front of the Wizengamot and granting Draco his freedom _(He did what he could)_ and his peace _(and that was enough)._

Just like Harry was burned by Words that gave him a newfound enemy in Voldemort, Draco too finds a new enemy in Harry, because for the first time in his sheltered, privileged existence, he is forced to confront the possibility that not everybody loves him, and he is not perfect, and that perhaps _Weasley_ is better than him, and maybe some of the things his parents have been telling him are wrong.

Draco shies away from such thoughts, because he is eleven years old and scared and a coward, and denies the hurt and doubt he can feel blooming in the Words' wake. Instead, he shifts the blame fully onto Harry, and decides in that moment to hate him, and unknowingly changes everything.

A friendship with Harry could have saved Draco. Instead, the lack of one sentences him to suffering.

It is unknowing, too, when Draco Marks Hermione Granger with _Mudblood_ on her left arm and disrupts her entire view of the wizarding world and its prejudices. Hermione learns some hard, hurtful lessons that day, and forces herself to accept that for some people, she will never be more than her blood.

It is hard to accept.

Years later, Bellatrix Lestrange traces that Word almost reverently before she digs it deep into Hermione's flesh, and spills out screams and dirty, clean blood.

Hermione is pure and tainted and whole and broken, and that Word never lets her forget it.

But she doesn't know it just yet, because she's twelve and thinks she's in love with Gilderoy Lockhart, and then she gives Harry a word - Basilisk - that leads him down into a hidden Chamber beneath Hogwarts where he discovers a sodden diary and a bleeding girl and three new Words:

_Tom Marvolo Riddle._

They're darker than the shadows of the dungeons when they bury into the pale canvas of his left shoulder, like a weight he will always carry.

But Harry has a secret.

Everyone knows of him - Harry Potter, The Chosen One, the boy whose first Words were Death, but yet he Lived - and they think they know his Words. They think they know his stories. They think they know all of him.

They don't.

He doesn't fully understand it until he's thirteen and dying slowly at the skeletal hands of a Dementor on a train going nowhere, but it is a secret he has kept ever since and that he values immensely:

Harry's first Words are of Death, but they are also of _Love_.

_I'll do anything_ his Words whisper - promise, plead, vow - and they are tattooed directly over his heart.

Harry's true first Words are his mother begging for his life. He hears them still, sometimes, in his most terrifying dreams - hears his mother cry and beg _not Harry!_ and refuse to leave him. He hears his mother scream. He thinks, sometimes, that if a scream could have Words, they would be scraped across every inch of his skin, for how horrific and haunting they are; he thinks nothing could reach down and grab at his soul more tightly than listening to his mother's desperation and death.

Sirius offers Harry a home. It is the best moment of his entire life, when his godfather awkwardly offers _you could stay with me, if you like_ and it immediately sews itself in delicate letters high up on the left side of his neck, tucked under his jaw on the patch of skin where Sirius had placed his rough, world-worn hand and gently cradled his head.

It had felt like love and hope and belonging, and it had been beautiful right up until it wasn't.

The rat escaped, and Sirius left, both with Harry's Mark upon their skin - _He's not worth it. My father wouldn't want you to be a murderer_ \- and Harry wishes hopelessly that he could take those stupid Words back, if only so he could have Sirius again.

Everything tastes like bitter anger and old hate when he's back at the Dursleys' and shut up in his room once more, incredibly alone.

He gets his next Words in a graveyard.

_Kill the spare_ his right wrist hisses, below the hand that reached for the Cup and didn't reach for Cedric in time. Harry already has the noose of the Killing Curse clenched tight around his throat like a leash, but he thinks distantly that his right wrist is where someone might attach another, if they felt so inclined, or perhaps a handcuff.

Perhaps a chain.

He gets those Words in a graveyard, and all they bring him is agony and grief.

_(- and a burning anger that is foreign and familiar and eats him alive.)_

Umbridge ignites a blaze made of the old, bitter anger Harry had carried ever since the Dursleys - ever since his last scraps of family hurt him so deeply his soul never forgot it. She takes that spark of hatred that had curled around Harry's heart and written _get in your cupboard_ on his arm, and she warps it into an inferno.

He wants to set her alight in his loathing.

_I must not tell lies_ is what she tells him to carve into his skin and write in his own blood, like she thinks she can just decide to Mark other people with Words of her choosing. Like she thinks she can just carve up their souls. It makes the hatred in Harry boil. She smirks and simpers and grins in sick delight, and her arrogance and casual cruelty change something in Harry.

She kills just a little bit more of his hope, and darkens just a little bit more of his soul, and even after the blood has been wiped away and the cursed injuries are gone, the words still remain on the back of his hand in furious black letters.

There's an addictive, acidic pleasure in hurling those spiteful words back in Umbridge's face right before the centaurs drag the wicked bitch away to her doom.

Sirius dies, and Harry screams. There are no words that could describe the stabbing agony that rips through his being and leaves him broken and hollow.

He still has those Words high up on his neck. Where before they had been a beautiful promise of _home_ , now they are just another scar to remind him of all he has lost.

Harry has tried so, so hard, for so long, and all he has to show for it is this patchwork of pain.

_Severus. Please_. Dumbledore begs, and Harry watches the Words bloom across Snape's exposed right wrist. For a moment he thinks it means they're safe. For a moment he thinks it means that Snape is on their side, after all. For a moment he thinks it means they're going to be okay.

And then Snape whispers _Avada Kedavra_ , and it writes itself across Dumbledore's exposed neck even as he topples backwards and _falls, falls, falls_ and dies.

Something in Harry rips out of him and breaks. He wants to shout, wants to scream, wants to strangle Severus Snape with his bare hands. Dumbledore's spell, the last he had ever cast, to keep Harry safe, finally fails and Harry knows then that this moment is irreversible.

He's heartbroken. He's furious. He thinks he'll never forgive Snape for this.

It won't be until a year later, in the depths of a Pensieve, that Harry will learn that the Word _Avada_ is inked deep into Severus Snape's left hand, and the Word _Kedavra_ into his right. They have been there ever since he was forced to kill one of the few men that ever cared about him.

Severus hates the Words across his palms, that lie there so damningly as if the only thing he has ever given the world has been death.

_(Severus hates his Words, but he hates himself more, because he was the one that put them there.)_

Harry should have known, really, back when he'd been eleven on that train making a friend for the first time: sometimes things are too good to be true. Eventually the fizzy powder runs out and the magic fades away, and he can't keep dancing forever.

Ron - _Ron, who is his best friend, his oldest friend, who is written across the palm of Harry's right hand, across his soul..._

Ron leaves, and doesn't look back.

Harry sits in a dark tent in a darker forest so close to alone it could almost break him, and thinks viciously that the fire that warmed him up at eleven has burned him now at seventeen, and he'll never recover from the flames and their scars.

(He clutches his right hand that night in his sleep, as if holding tightly enough to that phantom handshake still clinging to his skin and soul after all this time will convince his first and oldest friend to please just _come back_.)

_You have one hour_ Voldemort announces and seals Harry's fate. It slips across the sole of his left foot, silent and condemning, just like the path Harry must now walk.

Far too soon, he gets more Words, this time on the sole of his right foot; the Words that will lead him on a walk to his death.

He only hears the words in a Pensieve, and they were spoken more than a year ago, but they shatter him anyway. They talk about him like Vernon did, denying him his name even as he is slowly lowered into this coffin fate has built for him.

_The boy must die._

One final betrayal, by a man he loved and respected and mourned. Dumbledore made him a perfect weapon, and he can't even regret it, because he'd rather be the final blow to Voldemort before he dies than just another child for him to murder.

The boy must die, and he will - but he doesn't have to die alone.

The Resurrection Stone is a cold comfort, but he'd rather be surrounded by ghosts than nothing at all.

He's too scared to ask them if they love him.

They promise they do anyway. It's not perfect, and it won't save him, but it's enough. It's one last, faint taste of that fizzy powder on the train when he realised that the boy - the freak - could be cared about, could be loved.

The only difference is that this time he's not dancing. He's drowning.

_I'll do anything_ , he thinks. It's true.

They were his first Words, and his mother's last, and perhaps they will be his last words too. His first and his last, his saviour and his downfall, his beginning and his end.

It is fitting.

He walks into the forest and the darkness and the death, expecting nothing, but deep in his heart safe with the knowledge that no matter what happens, the bookends of his short and exceptional life were not only shadowed in Death.

They were cloaked in Love, and that matters more than anything else. That matters most.

_I'll do anything_ , he thinks, and means it, and then he walks forwards and proves it and dies.

_I open at the close_ , Harry had said, but he hadn't really, because this was the end to his story, not the beginning.

Except maybe he had, because as Death swoops in and closes around him, Harry cracks himself open one last time and lets all of the love he has bottled up inside him and written across his soul in his mother's soft script pour right out of him, and right there at the end of everything Harry has never been more shackled and more free.

This destiny wasn't Harry's choice but his death is, and the chains slip loose as he sets the rest of the world free.

Death is quiet.

Harry didn't expect such silence - mostly he expected nothing at all, because he didn't know to expect anything - but if he had he thinks he would have expected screaming. It is, after all, what he has witnessed most in conjunction with Death: cruelty and screaming and pain. There was always pain. It was Death's constant. Pain was an old companion of the end of everything, and so it had become Harry's, too.

There is no pain.

There is no pain, and there is no screaming, and there is no darkness either. It is all very disconcerting, and Harry rather thinks that his brain must have done him one last favour and hallucinated him a nice way out of existence. But the hallucination keeps on going, and Harry keeps staring at this misty white nothingness, and clearly a hallucination would have ended by now, if only because of his impending demise - _and really, he should be dead, why isn't he dead?_ \- so clearly he's at least a little bit more alive than he thought he was.

And then there's Dumbledore, and with him come a lot of vague, misleading, confusing non-answers and a warped, hideous baby. It's all par for the course, really, as far as Harry's concerned, because at this point he's not so sure he hasn't just gone insane, but it turns out that life is far more incredible and ridiculous than Harry could ever imagine it to be.

_He is dead, my Lord_ Narcissa lies, and the Words blossom like dark wings across Harry's back, an old, rebounding echo of the love that's spilled across his heart. The loves of two mothers are inked into his skin, and they save him in ways they both do and don't know.

Harry finally looks a murderer in the eye and knows that his annihilation is near. Death draws in around them one last time, and the world sparks green and red and Harry finally has his revenge he swore to get so many years ago.

_Expelliarmus!_ Harry yells, and for the first time in his life he gives himself a Word, and it streaks across the vulnerable skin of his left wrist, right over his pulse like a key that unlocks the chains around his right wrist after all these years, and they set him free.

Voldemort crumples and is gone, and Harry stands as a scrapbook of Words that string together into fragments of an impossible story, and he breathes. The burden of the Words across shoulders - the tale of his parents' murders and the name of a monster - finally lifts, and he realises the noose and chains are gone.

He has done it. Finally, he can be at peace.

The sun is warm where it shines through the open windows of the Hall, and it tickles his skin gently like the caress of a loving mother. Harry's friends gather around him, and the weight of dark Words and truths and duties lifts from his shoulders; he stands tall and safe and loved, and he is home.

In the ninety eight years that follow, Harry only ever gets one more Word. After the life he has lived, he's content to never be touched so deeply by anything ever again. His soul already has enough marks; he doesn't need any more.

But the first time his son gazes up at him with a bright, infectious laugh and giggles, _"Daddy!"_ the Word is forever etched into his heart and soul and around the base of the thumb his first child clings tightly to. It is the last time his identity is ever changed, but it is by far his best and favourite of them all.

His son grins up at him and laughs again, toothless and delighted, and Harry smiles wide and loves him. When the giggles are gone and his son is asleep, Harry rests his head gently against his chest, right over Harry's heart and the Words his mother left there, and simply holds his warm, tiny little child close.

It is the best feeling in the world, like dancing inside.

**Author's Note:**

> This AU will get a sequel at some point. Maybe. I'm toying with the idea of a series called Marked. I think it would be fun to write about other characters and their Marks. If that sounds interesting, lemme know. Or even if there are specific characters you would like to hear about. Neville, maybe? Or Voldemort? Rita Skeeter? So many possibilities... Right now I mostly want to see Harry's Marks from an outside perspective. What if the world saw FREAK inked on his back? Snape might be getting a short fic about him and Lily and the Marks she left on him, too.
> 
> Also, Harry totally needs some love. I just don't know who the hell to ship him with. I nearly made this drarry or maybe harmony, but then I decided that gen suits it better. I think that was the right choice for the kind of story I was trying to tell with this. If anyone can suggest a ship for this AU, and give a good reason for it, I might write it. Rare pair or popular, I don't mind as long as the reason is good/interesting.
> 
> So there will probs be a sequel at some point. Who knows. Certainly not me.
> 
> Having said that, I have at least four different fics I need to finish. Soooo... Maybe. No promises.
> 
> **As always, thank you so much for reading. If you would let me know in the comments what you thought and what your favourite line/part was, that would mean the world to me.**
> 
> Have a magical day, my wonderful witches and wizards. And don't forget that we've all got a little magic inside us.


End file.
